Neither May 29 nor June 12

Tomorrow will no doubt mark an important date in the political calendar of Nigeria; it will be the first time since the infamous annulment of the results of June 12, 1993 presidential election that a, if not the, principal actor in the saga, would hopefully reveal all about it. The actor is, of course, Professor […]

Tomorrow will no doubt mark an important date in the political calendar of Nigeria; it will be the first time since the infamous annulment of the results of June 12, 1993 presidential election that a, if not the, principal actor in the saga, would hopefully reveal all about it. The actor is, of course, Professor Humphrey Nwosu, the chairman of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) which conducted the election fifteen years ago.

Several of the main actors in the drama, not least of all General Ibrahim Babangida, the military president who annulled the election, have said a lot about it but what they have said has generated more bheat than light on the issue. Babangida has consistently accepted full responsibility for the decision as he should as a leader. However, he has also consistently dropped hints that many of those who often condemned him for the decision had supported him, if not encouraged him, to do so. But, typical of his style as a grandmaster of ambiguity, the man always refused to be drawn on specifically who those two-timing actors were.

Hopefully Professor Nwosu would reveal all tomorrow as he launches his much awaited book on his tenure.

In an interview in the Spectator of June 6, he said he has indeed revealed all in his book. The newspaper had asked him how he managed to go ahead with the election in spite of a court ruling on June 10 forbidding him from doing so. The court’s ruling was at the behest of the notorious Association for Better Nigeria led by the controversial Senator Arthur Nzeribe.

His answer, which must have surprised many Nigerians, was that he got help from within the high echelon of Babangida’s administration.

Spectator: Who were the people that helped?

Nwosu: That’s what you will find out in the book.

Spectator: Just give us a tip of the iceberg, please.

Nwosu: No. The book will tell you who did what. How the court order came? All the processes, all the individuals, whoever played what roles, for or against the elections, you will find all these in the book. These are what Nigerians would want to know. Who really didn’t want it, and who did what thereafter.”

It’s a long shot, but my own bet is that Babangida would come out of the book much better than the terrible picture the media had painted of his central role in it, if only because he has always accepted full responsibility for his decision.

I’ll also bet – and this time with almost absolute certainty – that the book will once and for all expose many, if not most, of the June 12 protagonists for the crass opportunists that they have been.

Whether they truly believe in it or merely pay lip service to it their mantra has been that June 12 is “the freest and fairest” election in Nigeria’s history. It is therefore no surprise that they have been outraged by the decision by former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, to declare May 29 as the country’s Democracy Day. This was the day in 1999 that he was sworn in as Nigeria’s first elected ruler after General Muhammadu Buhari overthrew the Second Republic in December 1983.

Penultimate Tuesday, i.e. May 27, Dr. Olatunji Dare, a faithful “June Twelver” if ever there was one, articulated the deep-seated resentment of the group against May 29 in his column in The Nation with characteristic clarity, even if with a bit of hyperbole.

Far from being the real McCoy, as the Americans would say, May 29, which he dismissed as “Their ‘Democracy Day,’” in the title of his column, was no more than “the beginning of the conquest and subjugation of the Nigerian political space by the Peoples’ Democratic Party”.

“To the ‘June Twelvers’,” he said, “it meant not just a retreat from, but a betrayal of, the spirit that had animated the freest and the fairest election that the present generation of Nigerians have ever witnessed or will ever know.”

So contemptuous was Dare – well-known for his mastery of the satire – of President Obasanjo’s decision to declare May 29 as Democracy Day that he could not even bring himself to call the man by his name.

“Yet,” said the columnist in what seemed a sarcastic dig at the ex-president, May 29 “was the day former President Coliseum Basanko proclaimed ‘democracy day’. Caught in the foam of events, he took the appearance for the substance.”

This was the same Obasanjo that Dare defended more than once in The Comet, now rested, against what he apparently perceived as a threat to him from his erstwhile Northern mentors. Not that one should never criticize someone one defends. Such criticisms should, however, be based on principles rather than sentiments. This, however, is another matter for possibly another day.

The issue before us this morning is the argument that June 12 and not May 29 should be Nigeria’s “Democracy Day.” I say without any equivocation that June 12 is no more qualified as the day to celebrate our democracy than May 29. I agree with Wole Soyinka, the Nobel

Literature Laureate, in his interview in last weekend’s Vanguard that Obasanjo’s choice of May 29 was an ego trip and an insult to Nigerians. And as Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an Afenifere chieftain, said in the same newspaper, “May 29 is a product of June 12. May 29 is Obasanjo’s day. It was the day he was sworn in to reap where he did not sow.”

However, while I agree with them that May 29 does not qualify as democracy day, I equally disagree with them that June 12 does.

Contrary to their deep seated view, June 12 was never the freest and the fairest election held in Nigeria. As far as the facts go, the 1979 and even the 1999 presidential elections were freer and fairer than June 12. For one, the run-up to both elections were not characterized by what Dare referred to in his column of June 12 last year titled “June 12; What if…”, as “the twists and turns and wild improvisation” that he said Chief M.K.O. Abiola, the presumed winner of the June 12 elections, in effect admitted had marred the transition programme to his own election in what Dare said was to have been Abiola’s inaugural speech.

It is elementary politics that elections are made or marred long before polling day. As Nwosu said in the Spectator interview in question, “Rigging, and winning elections,” he said, “can start with the voters’ register.” If the “June Twelvers” are honest with themselves, they would be the first to admit that “the twists and turns and wild improvisation” of the Babangida transition programme could hardly have guaranteed a truly free and fair election.

It was, after all those twists and turns and wild improvisations that prompted critics of Babangida’s transition programme like Chief Gani Fawehinmi and Chief Anthony Enahoro and even The Guardian stable, the self-styled flagship of the Nigerian press, to dismiss Babangida’s transition programme as a complete sham.

Fawehinmi, for example, told Tell (November 9, 1992) that the Social Democratic Party and the National Republican Convention parties created by Babangida were worse than parastatals. “First of all,” he said, “you know that the political parties, they are all Babangida Clubs. They are Babangida Babes. So he decides what to do with them anytime, and since they are his Babes, football Babes, he plays the way he wants.”

Chief Enahoro was even more scathing. Babangida’s transition programme, he said in The News of February 15, 1993, was a “charade. I think it is a tragedy that people of that status allow one man to be fooling them.”

As for The Guardian stable, it was telling that its now defunct weekly newsmagazine, The African Guardian, dismissed Chief Abiola and Alhaji Bashir Tofa  as “The President’s Men” on the cover of its edition of April 12, 1993. This was after they had emerged as the presidential candidates of the SDP and NRC respectively.

It was precisely because the public lost confidence in Babangida’s long drawn transition programme that relatively few Nigerians bothered to vote on June 12. According to Nwosu in The Spectator interview, over 39 million Nigerians registered to vote during the transition elections. Only a little over 13 million i.e. less than 35% voted on June 12. Compare this to the over 50% of voters that turned out for both the 1979 and 1999 elections.

Just like it is elementary politics that elections are made or marred long before 

This article was first published on this space on June 11, 2008. It’s still relevant today as it was then.